Blade Network Technologies opens office to meet rising demand for data center networking in Middle East and Africa

Al Sayegh Brothers Trading, a full service institution that offers complete brand management solutions, has been appointed as the master distributor in the UAE for Blade's RackSwitch family of data center switches.

"We are pleased to expand our worldwide presence with our new sales and support office in the UAE, one of the world's leading centers of commerce. Customers across the Middle East and Africa are deploying our RackSwitch products to meet their growing data center networking requirements; this new regional presence demonstrates our commitment to the region,"

said Charles Ferland, Vice President of EMEA, Blade Network Technologies.

He added, "We are delighted to have appointed Al Sayegh Brothers as our master distributor in the United Arab Emirates, whose extensive channel experience will play a key role in helping Blade take maximum advantage of the huge potential on offer in the region. Blade's 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet RackSwitch products have already been deployed to solve latency and performance issues at major oil and gas companies, educational institutions and other businesses."

"Blade Network Technologies is a premier provider of data center networking solutions," said Abdul Jabbar Al Sayegh, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Al Sayegh Brothers Group. "We are proud to become the master distributor for BLADE's RackSwitch products for the United Arab Emirates."

Blade is one of the top three providers of 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, according to Dell'Oro Group's Q209 Ethernet Switch Quarterly Report, and is on track to deliver another year of strong growth. The company achieved its best ever quarterly revenues, profits and market share following the close of its third fiscal 2009 quarter on July 31.

Blade leads Cisco in market share of Ethernet switches for blade servers through its trusted partnerships with HP, IBM, NEC and Verari Systems and recently completed its Series B financing with new investors NEC, Juniper Networks and a third technology industry leader as a silent investor. These join founding investor, Garnett & Helfrich Capital, which reinvested in the company. This funding round values the company at $230m.

Wesgreen International School in Sharjah, UAE, has recently commenced an evaluation of Blade RackSwitch Gigabit/10 Gigabit solutions as part of its strong commitment to maintaining an optimised technology and networking infrastructure. There are four state-of-the-art computer labs in the school and these meet the challenging needs of students incorporating the latest developments in the field of science and technology.

Babar Mughal, Wesgreen's IT Unit Head comments, "In an age of information explosion, no one can afford to be indifferent to the vast resources available on the internet. That is why we provide internet facilities for our students so they can make use of the web in completing project work thus developing creativity, research skills and encouraging homework. We believe in giving the best to our students and as demand grows ensuring high speed internet and network access will be essential for continuing to meet their expectations and requirements. This is why the Blade RackSwitch is so exciting as it offers a cost-effective solution for high performance, low latency computing for now and in the future."

Blade maintains a worldwide presence including its Santa Clara, CA headquarters, Blade Network Research (BNR) development subsidiary in Ottawa, Canada and BLADE Network K.K. subsidiary in Japan and sales and support operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia Pacific, China and Korea.